Pulp Fictions: mapping the sexual landscape

Phil Hubbard

Introduction

The sexual only exists in and through the modes of its organisation and representation. 

(Weeks, 1985)

The contemporary city is a variegated and multiplex city [...] The city 
is not a unitary or homogeneous entity and perhaps it never has been.

(Amin and Graham, 1996).

In a recent paper, the cultural historian Frank Mort (2000) suggests that the neglect of sexuality’s ‘social and symbolic geographies’ is curious given the current interest across the social sciences in the (re)production of sexual identities, practices and lifestyles. Inspired by post-structural ideas that acknowledge the contingency and becoming of existence, such work has rejected taken-for-granted assumptions that sexual identities can be unproblematically mapped onto an established gender divide. Instead, a wholly predominant trend has been for researchers to accept the challenges posed by queer theory and to theorize sex - like gender - as a social construct created through the intersection of discourses, practices and knowledges (see, for example, Butler, 1990; Probyn, 1996). Accordingly, there is now a sizable literature documenting how different sexual identities have been formed and transformed within particular relations of power/knowledge. In particular, those who have constructed critical genealogies of sexuality - Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks and Alain Corbin providing key examples - have done much to popularize the idea that sexual categories and identities are not universal but contingent, undermining taken-for-granted understandings that certain sexualities are ‘natural’. Simultaneously, writing on corporality has also problematised any straightforward relation between sexuality and biology. In the influential account provided by Judith Butler (1990), for instance, sexuality is re-conceptualised as a ‘performance of the self’ rooted in politics and history rather than genetics and biology. Therein, the sexual ‘norms’ which are often assumed to express essential identities are re-imagined as the outcome of the recurrent performances that constitute them as such.

In the light of such debates, ideas about neatly integrated and stable sexual identities have fallen apart as sexuality has become re-conceptualised as the product of fractured performances (Cream, 1995). Rejecting established and ordered binaries (e.g. sociology/biology, insides/outsides, male/female, queer/straight), such theorisation implies that sexual identities are diffuse and multiple, needing to be considered in parallel with topologically-complex understandings of space. However, in contrast to the voluminous literature concerning the discursive construction of sexual categories, Mort (2000) argues little has been said about the spatial dimensions of these discourses, and the way sexual identities are mapped onto, and out of, the urban landscape. Of course, there are important exceptions, and although traditionally regarded as ‘squeamish’ about sexual matters (Bell, 1995), recent research by urban and social geographers has begun to demonstrate that space is inevitably sexed in a variety of complex ways, placing issues of sex and sexuality firmly on the geographical agenda. As such, there is now a substantial body of critical geographic scholarship which has indicated that space is fundamentally shaped by the dynamics of human sexuality, reflecting the ways in which sex is represented, perceived and understood (Knopp, 1995). These arguments have been most forcibly made in research by geographers on the experiences of lesbians, gays and bisexuals which have collectively suggested that ‘everyday’ spaces are often experienced by such groups as aggressively heterosexual (Adler and Brenner, 1992; Valentine, 1993). Latterly, however, these arguments have been extended into a wider consideration of the sexualisation of space that has explored the way that a specific (oedipal) version of heterosexual desire has been territorialised in the modern cityscape (Hubbard, 2000).

Nonetheless, Mort (2000) remains critical of this nascent body of work, suggesting that it tends to be pitched at a high level of abstraction, failing to ground the dynamics of sexuality in specific times and places. Instead, Mort suggests that work in cultural history might provide a better role model for exploring the relationship between sexuality and space, providing guidelines for research into the sexual geography of the city. Exemplary here, he claims, is the work of Judith Walkowitz (1992) on the contested spaces of sexual identity of late nineteenth century London, and George Chauncey’s (1995) account of the development of gay spaces in early twentieth century New York. Each of these, he argues, demonstrates the spatially-contingent nature of sexuality, illustrating how sexual networks were spatially disciplined and regulated as understandings of morality and modernity were mapped onto the cityscape. Here, we might also mention the historically-nuanced work of Linda Nead (1997) on the moral mapping of the nineteenth century metropolis, as well as Mona Domosh’s (1995) incisive account of the ways that ‘New York women’ were permitted to immerse themselves in the public and commercial life of the city.

However, while these accounts offer a highly detailed and contextualised account of the sexual geographies of the city, they are not without their limitations. Crucially, and to borrow de Certeau’s (1984) phrase, they offer a ‘view from above’, being based primarily on the official sources and documents that exercised a regulatory function by providing an ‘overview’ of the sexual life of the city. As Mort (1998) describes, such sources served, in a ‘classically Foucaultian manner’, to impose a moral order on the city, identifying non-conforming sexual practices as perturbations in an otherwise sexually ordered city. Hence, when we consider such representations, we need to be aware of the fact that they are a product of a particular way of seeing (in many cases, the product of a panoptic and powerful gaze that sought to create a city in its own image). The limitations of such mappings of the sexual city are then sharply etched, as while they may allow us to view the ‘whole’, we lose sight of the city at street level, where sexual subjects weave their own spatial logics ‘from below.’ Crucial here is the notion that locations are imbued by individuals with their own distinctive erotics, and that subversive sexual performances, encounters and practices may resist official geographies. Documenting the pulse of bodies on the street, their meetings and mismeetings, glances and gazes, thus becomes essential if we are to grasp the sexual geography of the metropolis. Hence, the turn to street literature, poetry and travelogue, whether it be the urbane strollings of Edmund White (2001), the urgent eroticism of Stuart Home (see Bell and Binnie, 1998) or Reynaud Camus’ paeons to the sexuality of Paris (see Rifkin, 1996). In their own ways, each of these offers an ‘underview’ of the sexual life of the city, capturing the erotic life of the city in ways that ‘views from above’ cannot.

It is in this sense that Mort (2000) argues for the necessity of developing a new way of mapping the sexual city, working with the tensions and conflicts between these different representations. The difficulty of this task is immediately apparent; how can we possibly resolve these tensions, bridging the gap between experience and representation? How can we tack between official and unofficial maps of the city in the hope of constructing an account which might communicate the problematic relation between the poetry and the politics of the city? How can we render visible the tensions between the parts of the city and its whole? There are, of course, no easy answers (see Pile and Thrift, 2000). Nonetheless, in the remainder of this paper I want to offer some initial thoughts as to how we can work with these tensions and contradictions to construct a ‘practical knowledge’ of the city that will alert us to the way that the sexual city is rendered visible as an object of governance as well as its existence as a site of multiple sexual and erotic experience. In so doing, I alight on the music and lyrics of the pop group Pulp, which I take to offer a particularly insightful mapping of the sexual city. Before doing so, however, I wish to briefly reflect on the work of Walter Benjamin, which seems to offer some important clues for the writing of sexual geographies.

Walter Benjamin and the dialectics of seeing: close up and far away

The realisation that representation plays a crucial role in inscribing urban landscapes with constantly shifting social and moral values is by no means a new one, with geographers having drawn on a variety of theoretical and philosophical traditions to argue that books, photographs, music, television and film form the basis of a symbolic system of representation which lies at the heart of socio-spatial process. In the wake of this ‘cultural’ and ‘linguistic’ turn, geographers have expended much effort interrogating the images, sounds and metaphors used to narrate and model the city (e.g. Keith and Pile, 1996; Pile and Thrift, 2000). Recently, this has encompassed a consideration of the way that diverse knowledges of the city - including geographies - have been built up into seemingly convincing (and explanatory) ‘diagrams’ (Osborne and Rose, 1999; Donald, 1999). Consideration of some of the more widespread motifs and images deployed (e.g. city as body, city as a melting pot, city as theme park and so on) suggests that such mappings are rarely innocent. Indeed, from the nineteenth century onwards it has been possible to document the emergence of a whole series of initiatives and techniques designed to gather, organize, classify and disseminate knowledge about the social worlds of the city. Innumerable forms of documentation and evidence (e.g. novels, social statistics, academic papers, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, film) have thus served to make sense of the multiple geographies of the modern city, rendering its darkest and most dangerous spaces visible to the population at large (Donald, 1999). While the motivations of those who produce these forms of urban knowledge varies widely, their vantage point has typically been similar - a distanced ‘view from above’ that maps out the city. These mappings are thus implicated in processes of urban governance, providing the detailed knowledge which is used to regulate the city (though not always successfully).

In contrast to these views ‘from above’, it is possible to identify the existence of very different tropes of urban representation. For example, occupying the hinterland between journalism, urban sociology, poetry and pornography, flâneurial accounts of the nooks and crannies of urban living provided a very different take on the city, exposing the unconscious life of the city - a life often repressed in official representations. Foremost here are the obsessive diaries and musings of urban flâneurs (and proto-psychogeographers) such as Baudelaire, Breton and Aragon. In their accounts, the city’s streets are populated with readily recognizable stereotypes; infamous figures who serve to make the city (and its pleasures and horrors) legible; the policeman, the dandy, the pickpocket, the turburcular, the ragpicker, the prostitute, the journalist, the sandwich board man, the street Arab, the drunk and so on (Osborn and Rose, 1999). This gallery of types exemplifies ‘metaphorically different ways of knowing the city’ as well as ‘metanymically different cities that can be known’ (Keith, 2000). In relation to the sexual life of the city, the prostitute has been perhaps the most important of these:

The prostitute was the quintessential figure of the urban scene...the central spectacle in a set of urban encounters and fantasies. Repudiated and desired, degraded and threatening, the prostitute attracted the attention of a range of urban male explorers from the 1840s to the 1880s (Walkowitz, 1992).

In the nineteenth century, the relation between flâneur and whore - the female flâneuse - was therefore complex, revealing both the erotic possibilities of the city as well as its limits (Hubbard, 1999). But ultimately, the fascination of the flâneur with the prostitute was to emphasise the partiality of flâneurial representations of the city, exposing the inherent phallocentrism of the male gaze (Buck-Morss, 1989).

Reflecting on the nineteenth century metropolis, Walter Benjamin similarly made reference to such iconic characters. For example, in his infamous Arcades project (Benjamin, 1999), convolutes (folders) were devoted to the prostitute, gambler, collector, and, crucially, the flâneur himself (see also Benjamin, 1973). In a remarkably astute essay, Keith (2000) suggests that Benjamin’s focus on these urban types was informed by his desire to expose the way such categories had been created and categorised by the urban representations that merely seemed to describe them. Here, city types were seen as the organising tropes that mediated knowledge of the city; their unfinished and contingent nature emphasised by Benjamin as he turned urban knowledges back on themselves. Poised between the dreamscapes and realities of the city, Benjamin’s project involved a constant interplay between closeness and distance - a dialectic movement that continually shifted from the representation of the whole to the experience of the parts, from the multiple perspectives of the viewer to the multiple experiences of the actors who lived, worked and died in the city. Reflecting on the interplay between representation and the city, Benjamin’s montages thus provide clues as to how knowledges of the urban play off the real and imagined experiences of the city: his ‘play of distances, transitions and intersections’ transcends conventional tropes of representation to crack open the ‘natural teleology’ of the city (translators’ forward in Benjamin, 1999).

Unlike psychogeographical accounts which seek to close up the ‘gap’ between experience and representation, writing of a city of playful possibilities that escapes discipline, mediation and spectacularisation, Benjamin’s cultural materialism thus offers a distinctive take on the city. This does not seek to efface the differences between (dominant) representations of space and lived practices, but emphasises them, bringing the contested and ambiguous nature of urban experiences into sharper focus. There is no search here for an unmediated, pure representation - after all, a representation is always a view from somewhere, the product of a particular ‘way of seeing’ (and being in) the city. Hence, Benjamin does not privilege the ‘view from below’ - the street poetry which valorizes a playful, humanistic city - over the ‘view from above’, but holds both in abeyance as he seeks to construct a practical knowledge that takes the figuring of cities seriously. As a consequence, Benjamin’s work is currently influential in urban studies, not just for those seeking to understand the ambiguities of nineteenth century modernity, but for all those concerned with developing new ways of representing the city, combining the empirical and theoretical to weave a narrative of the city that makes sense of the city for the urban dweller (Pile and Thrift, 2000). In short, his work ‘is helpful in avoiding both the mirage of a defining theoretical essence of the city and the Luddism that can render the city invisible in contemporary social theory’ (Keith, 2000).

However, this is not to suggest that Benjamin offers the role model for contemporary explorations of the sexual city. After all, his work was the product of a particular time and place, and the technology used to image the nineteenth century city (e.g. panoramas, dioramas, photographs) has extended indefinitely through virtualism, simulation and the hyper-real. Equally, the urban types implicated in the figuring of the contemporary city have changed too, with Bech (1998) arguing that the male homosexual, not the prostitute, is now ‘the prototypical figure par excellence in relation to urban life.’ Extending such attempts to understand how the city is sexualised, it becomes evident that there are, in fact, a whole host of paradigmatic figures who currently serve to make the sexual possibilities and pitfalls of the city legible to us; the whore, paedophile, kerb-crawler, the suburban housewife, the flâneur, slut, playboy, lad, lone mother, pornographer, the rapist, the masturbator, the spinster and so on.

In this light, I suggest there is a need for a form of urban analysis that considers how these sexual types are mapped onto, and out of, real and imagined urban landscapes. But rather than seeking to fix these figures in these spaces, such analyses need to stress the process of figuring itself, reflecting on the way that myth and reality co-exist, effecting and bringing one another into existence. Such a perspective would identify urban representations as constitutive of the city itself, conceptualizing them as narratives which socially produce the city through a symbolic t(r)opography that is as real as any other form of urban space (Donald, 1999). As Keith (2000) recognises, this is to invert the normal urban problematic; to ask about the stories through which the city is rendered legible (and to document their effects), rather than to try to write the city in a better, more truthful way.

In the remainder of this paper, I want to begin to offer some clues as to what this reflexive perspective on the sexual city might entail. Bur rather than offering my own take on the way that the representation of the city shapes our sexual identities (at the same that we shape its sexuality), I instead want to highlight that such takes already exist. What I am suggesting here is that there are already many accounts of the sexual city that refuse to valorise either the ‘view from above’ or ‘view from below’, but instead move constantly and restlessly between them, demonstrating to us that our sexual lives are ‘structured’ by figurings of the city, but that we perpetually challenge and exceed these figurings, bringing new cities into being. These are accounts that help us make sense of the urban experience in more practical and meaningful ways than academic accounts fixated on (either) the view from ‘above’ or ‘below’. The example I use here is the lyrics and music of Pulp, a band hailing from Sheffield who have gathered much critical acclaim for their tales of everyday life in the city.

The porno-geographies of Jarvis Cocker 

It was being identified by a 1993 Melody Maker cover article as being at the vanguard of a new wave of ‘Britpop’ bands (alongside Suede, Elastica, Blur and Sleeper) that arguably secured Pulp’s commercial success. Depicted as an antidote to anodyne dance music, Pulp were singled out for combining traditional guitar-based pop with intelligent, yet accessible, lyrics. This was based largely on the album His and Hers, which was a minor chart hit in 1994; by 1995, their singles Common People and Disco 2000 had both peaked near the top of the singles sales chart and their album Different Class had been nominated for BPI and Mercury Music Prizes. More notoriously, the incursion of their lead singer and lyricist, Jarvis Cocker, onto the stage while Michael Jackson performed at the Brit Awards in 1996 attracted massive publicity, transforming the singer into a media celebrity and ‘cultural icon’. Their follow-up album This is Hardcore consolidated their earlier success, and while single sales diminished in the late 1990s, Cocker’s excursions into other media (including a TV series on ‘Outsider Art’) continued to keep the band in the public eye. This period of creative and commercial success overshadowed the fact that Pulp had been recording for many years before achieving their commercial breakthrough. Founded by lead singer Jarvis Cocker in 1980 as Abacus Pulp, the band gained a small but devoted following for its literate brand of guitar-based pop over the course of four albums released on independent labels (Separations, Freaks, Masters of the Universe and It). Very much an on/off project, it was while Jarvis Cocker was studying at St. Martin’s College of Art at the turn of the decade that the band began to marry his distinctive lyrics with a more commercial sound. Ironically, and against the backdrop of interest in ‘new’ British cultures, this was a sound that borrowed heavily from the ‘glam’ era of the 1970s (especially the music of Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music).

Yet if, as Frith (1997) argues, Pulp’s music had its roots in the sounds of Britain in the early 1970s, its lyrical content contains more specific spatial referents. In the main, Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics have centred on the everyday, narrating pseudo-autobiographical stories of living in the city. Significantly, many of the band’s songs have related his own observations of life in Sheffield, the city where he grew up and the band coalesced before taking residence in London in the 1990s. As a result, many of the band’s songs refer to specific neighbourhoods, clubs and shops in the city to ground the narrative within a particular spatial and temporal context. Such a tactic is by no means unique in contemporary popular music (e.g. many of the ‘Madchester’ bands name-checked locations in and around Manchester), but few have done so as explicitly as Pulp. Hence, and borrowing the title of a Pulp b-side, the monthly music magazine Select was able to isolate many of the locations which feature in the band’s music to provide a mapping of the city. The resulting map [right] thus begins to indicate the ways the city is made legible to us through the act of listening as well as looking (albeit that it is difficult to communicate this without resort to the visual media of a map). [view enlargement of map 150kb]

Yet while the resulting map offers one possible geographical interpretation of Pulp’s music and lyrics, in the context of this paper, I suggest this represents a remarkably limited and fixed reading of its topographies. In this instance, the relationship between music and the city is left underdeveloped; the discourse in Pulp’s lyrics is (literally) overlaid onto an ‘authorised’ discourse, that of an A-Z street map (i.e. a ‘view from above’). As Leyshon et al (1995) argue, the relationship between music and other representational forms is more complex than this, with the musical forms and lyrical content of songs often evading translation into other, more familiar, tropes of mapping. As such, it is possible to identify another geography in Pulp songs, one that takes place, but cannot be narrated in a manner that renders it equivalent to the other metaphorical images and pictures that constitute the city. This, then, is a geography that blurs the real and mythical landmarks of the city to bring into existence an imagined city. For Donald (1999), such imaginary landscapes can be described as spatial appropriations, poeticized certainly, but every bit as real in the negotiation of urban life. 

In the context of this paper, the sexualised nature of these appropriations is quite vivid. Indeed, as with the writings of Hanif Kureshi or the films of Gus Van Sant (see Oswell, 2000 and Lukinbeal and Aitken, 1998 respectively), Cocker’s songs may be read as paeans to the sexuality of the city, creating a landscape densely but unevenly filled with sexual meetings and mis-meetings. Explicitly documenting experienced, fantasised and unrequited sexual encounters, the subject matter of Pulp’s eight albums (and numerous singles) rarely deviates from a preoccupation with the sexual lives played out in the different sites of the city. Indeed, the two main themes running through his lyrics are those of sex and death, the two combining to create often humorous, but sometimes morbid, stories of the potentialities and pitfalls of everyday urban living. These stories are sometimes narrated from the perspectives of those involved in these scenarios, but more normally from the perspective of Jarvis Cocker, whose deadpan and atonal delivery heightens the seeming veracity of these observations. Importantly, the music rarely distracts from these lyrics, but foregrounds them in the ‘listening event’ (even if the lyric sheet that accompanies the Intro album obtusely warns against reading the lyrics at the same time as listening to the songs). 

Taking just one song - the single Common People -  is sufficient to demonstrate how notions of sexuality and place intertwine in Pulp’s songs. Recounting an (real?) encounter between Cocker and a female art student from ‘St. Martin’s College’, in three minutes the song delineates the fracture lines of class and sex that characterise this (mis)-meeting. Played out in the sensual space of a nightclub, the song relates the singer’s reply when the student explains that she wants to be like ‘common people’: 

Rent a flat above a shop / Cut your hair and get a job / Smoke some fags and play some pool / Pretend you never went to school / But still you’ll never get it right / `Cos when you’re laid in bed at night / Watching roaches climb the wall / If you called your Dad he could stop it all / Yeah / You’ll never live like common people / You’ll never do what common people do / You’ll never fail like common people / You’ll never watch your life slide out of view / And then dance, and drink, and screw / Because there’s nothing else to do 
(Common People, 1994)

This apparent contempt for the upper-middle classes, coupled with the title of the song, give the impression that the singer is able to identify with (and side) with ‘common people’, though the subsequent unfolding of the lyrics gives the impression that he feels able to locate himself  outside any traditional understanding of class. This notion perhaps suggests that Cocker is imagining himself as a modern-day flâneur, able to move easily from space to space and encounter to encounter, rendering the city and its different ‘tribes’ subject to his gaze. Like the nineteenth century rambler before him (Rendell, 1998) - or perhaps Michael Caine’s Alfie in the film of the same name (see Shonfield, 2000) - Cocker thus emphasizes his ability to freely move between stylish clubs and bars (e.g. Bar Italia, 1995) to the working-class spaces of the city (e.g. Mile End, 1997) to the suburbs (e.g. Styloroc Nights in Suburbia, 1988). 

As such, Cocker’s lyrics are written from the perspective of ‘an initiated member of the modern metropolis, wise to the delights and entertainments, the tricks and frauds of the urban realm’ (Rendell, 1998). The imaginary city he maps out is one that submits to his gaze, its guilty pleasures (e.g. Sheffield Sex City, 1990, Street Lites, 1992) and urban dangers (Dogs are Everywhere, 1985, Being Followed Home, 1987, Death goes to the Disco, 1987) rendered legible to him, for him, in turn, to communicate to others. Accordingly, many of his songs compel us to join him on a journey through the city and the night:

Now if you can stand / I would like to take you by the hand, yeah / And go for a walk / Past people as they go to work / Oh let’s get out of this place / Before they tell us that we’ve just that died...There’s only one place we can go / It’s round the corner in Soho / Where all the broken people go / Let’s go 
(Bar Italia, 1995)

Elsewhere he emphasizes his freedom to roam by proclaiming his ability to rise above the world of the streets, ‘Travelling at the speed of thought...It doesn’t matter if the lifts are out of order...We’re rising up above the city’ (Space, 1990). The view from the street shifts to a view from above, but, either way, the city submits to his male mastery:

Intake / Manor Park / The Wicker / Norton / Freshville / Hackenthorpe / Shalesmoor / Wombwell / Catcliffe / Brincliffe / Attercliffe / Ecclesall / Woodhouse / Wybourn / Pitsmoor / Badger / Wincobank / Crookes / Walkley / Broomhill...The city is a woman / Bigger than any other / Oh, sophisticated lady / Yeah, I wanna be your lover (not your brother, not your mother, yeah)...The whole city is your jewellery-box, a million twinkling yellow street lights / Reach out and take what you want, you can have it all 
(Sheffield Sex City, 1990)

Here, the ‘familiar’ landmarks of the city (i.e. different districts of Sheffield) become re-designated as the ‘erogenous zones’ of a woman who seemingly gives herself up to the singer: the city as body. Similarly, in Love is Blind (1985), Cocker sings ‘Give me the city / Give me the sea / Give to me everything I need / The future is shining / Like a giant metal beast / It shines so bright tonight / With its legs open wide’. Such attempts to anthropomorphize the city are, of course, far from rare, with Domosh (1995) stressing that this is a particularly common strategy which ‘rational’ male authority has used to make the city controllable and emphasize the dominance of masculine sexuality.

Crucially, Cocker’s seeming ability to navigate the streets with impunity allows him access to a city that is (sometimes literally) pregnant with possibilities for sexual encounter (‘Walking towards the city / I’m brighter than all the street lamps / Can have anything’ - The Will to Power, 1985). As such, he imagines the city as explicitly sexual, its erotics associated with his freedom to gaze without being seen (e.g. Babies, 1990). While Bech (1998) argues that there is nothing inherent in the city that must make of it a place of male sexual power, Pulp’s songs are indicative of those ‘familiar male fantasies’ which imagine the city as a site of freedom, opportunity and abundance. Through the power of a gaze which evaluates others on the basis of sexual criteria, this is a city that provides innumerable opportunities for glancing, gazing and flirting with the opposite sex, imagining them objects of desire (e.g. Pencil Skirt, 1995). Evoking the myth of the predatory male, Cocker’s lyrics make obvious connections between male mastery and the ability to conquer the feminine:

Imagining a blue plaque above the first place I ever touched a girl’s chest / But hold on / You’ve got to wait for the best / You see you should take me seriously / very seriously indeed / Because I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past sixteen weeks / Smoking your cigarettes / Drinking your brandy / Messing up the bed that you chose together / And all that time / I just wanted you to come home unexpectedly one afternoon / And catch us at it in the front room / You see, I spy for a living / And I specialize in revenge / On taking the things / I know will cause you pain 
(I Spy, 1995)

In such ways, Cocker’s lyrics seem to map out a scripting of sex and the city whereby the city provides opportunities (and sites) for heterosexual objectification of the feminine as an object of desire. As noted in Oswell’s (2000) exploration of the representation of suburbia, this is a scripting that connects with the idea that men feel the need to escape the constraints of suburbia, which is itself represented as a distinctly femininised environment. Here, numerous references to the spaces of suburbia in Pulp’s songs make clear this is a space as sexually un-adventurous and staid as the metropolitan city is invigorating:

A land of happy hours where the skies are grey and the food exceptionally greasy / We drank strange brown liquids, and our stomachs swelled up like balloons / A thousand fake orgasms every night behind thick draylon curtains... Stay we must, sprouting black hair beneath bri-nylon underwear...these nights of suburbia go on and on and on and on and on and on 
(Styloroc Nights in Suburbia, 1992)

Ridiculed for its kitsch cultural tastes (‘Woodchip on the wall’ - Disco 2000, 1995), suburbia thus becomes a space of routine and rut (as spelt out in This House is Condemned, 1994, which depicts a man trapped by ‘space, time, place, floor, wall, door, roof’). This, then, is a place of sexual conformity whose psychological damages can only be compensated for by predatory excursions into the city and the night. Of course, not all can do so with consummate ease, as related in the song Joyriders (1994); ‘We like driving on a Saturday night...We can’t help that we’re so thick we can’t think / Can’t think of anything / But shit, sleep and drink / Oh and we like women / "Up the women!" we say / And if we get lucky / We might even meet some one day’. 

Hence, it is easy to offer a critique of Pulp’s lyrics (which no doubt extends to their performance via video and concert) that emphasizes how they are loaded with phallocentric discourse and images. Indeed, the scopophilia evident in Jarvis Cocker’s songs, and his seeming pleasure in looking (e.g. I Spy, 1995, Babies, 1990), appears to acknowledge an Oedipal, phallic mode of representation where both the producer/singer and consumer/listener is male, the object of desire female. Extending Mulvey’s (1993) influential work on voyeurism in the cinema, for example, we might argue that the narrative offered in Pulp’s lyrics directs listeners towards a particular (and explicitly masculine and heterosexual) interpretation of the songs. Like those films exposed by Mulvey as deeply patriarchal, subjugating female pleasure to the pleasures of the male gaze, many of the songs considered here are blatantly fetishistic and voyeuristic, reinforcing established gender and sexual relations through their depiction of women as sexually accessible and vulnerable (something evident in the rape fantasy Little Girl with Blue Eyes, 1983 and the murder ballad Death Comes to Town, 1985). Herein, the misogyny implicit in many of the songs can be interpreted (with reference to notions of lack, castration and the phallus) as the efforts of an anxious male to reassert his control and power. More widely, it is also possible to argue that Cocker takes on the role of an all-seeing and all-knowing explorer mapping the urban frontier, his ability to maintain the illusion of a ‘view from nowhere’ tied into a masculine gaze that subjugates the female body, rendering it an object of desire (Kirby, 1996). In the song My Lighthouse (1983) these themes come together through allusion to a lighthouse that is both phallus and tower (‘Come to my lighthouse baby / It’s not just an ivory tower...The others watch my lighthouse / Their envy grows by the hour’).

Yet to argue that Pulp’s songs merely map out a city scripted using familiar tropes of feminine lack and male power, populating its spaces with sexual stereotypes that normalize a complacent heterosexuality, is to offer an interpretation that is not sufficiently attuned to the dialectic between representations and experiences of the city. On one level Pulp’s lyrics seem to suggest that life in the city is scripted around universal myths of the masculine or feminine body (and oedipal identities), yet they simultaneously show that the inhabitants are not simply actors condemned to endlessly repeat their alloted sexual roles. Instead, we come to understand the city’s sexual life as a field of possibility, wherein actors exceed their designated roles, and new experiences emerge as inhabitants position themselves within the sea of iconic figures that serve to make the city legible to them. In effect, this shows that no subject can ever fully correspond to these representations, but that there is a relationship between practical, corporal experience and the spatial practices of knowing a city (Keith, 2000). Viewed from a distance, the city is populated by stereotypes, but close up, stereotypes give way to people who are acutely aware of the representations that make the city an object of governance (Osborne and Rose, 1999). 

Indeed, although Pulp’s songs invoke many sexual stereotypes, embedding them in readily-identifiable locations, at the same time they contrast these images with other (embodied) stories of sexuality and space. Thus, Pulp’s imagined suburbia is also far from stereotyped, rendered no less exotic than spaces more traditionally associated with ‘perversity’ (see Hartley, 1997). Behind twitching curtains, the suburban home becomes a space of sexual experimentation (Live Bed Show, 1995), of inter-generational sex (PTA, 1995), of cross-dressing (Pink Glove, 1986, Your Sister’s Clothes, 1994) and of voyeurism (Underwear, 1995). At the same time, the taken-for-granted links between (hetero)sex and love are bought into question in songs which document the damages of all kinds - emotional, psychic and physical - which are done to men and women who feel obliged to remain trapped in a monogamous heterosexual relationship because it is expected of them (Hubbard, 2000). As such, this is a city also populated by pathetic men who imagine sexuality in terms of conquest and fail to question their own sexual desires (I’m a Man, 1998; Seductive Barry, 1998) and women who remain trapped in unfulfilling sexual and emotional relationships (Aborigines, 1985; Dishes, 1994). Yet alongside those songs that catalogue the remorse, regret and violence resulting from matching up to heterosexual ideals, there are many that document those who explore a ‘line of flight’ from the heterosexual norm (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Far from condemning activities like extra-marital sex (Happy Endings, 1988), inter-generational sex (Help the Aged,  1998), homosexuality (Pencil Skirt, 1994), troilism (David’s Last Summer, 1992) and masturbation (Do You Remember the First Time?, 1994), many of Pulp’s lyrics represent sexuality as a form of escape. Rejecting the stigmatization of non-nuclear forms of desire, Cocker seems to relish the revolutionary potentials of sexuality freed from a world of ‘endowment plans’, ‘pot pourri’ and ‘evenings in the Brincliffe Oaks pub searching for conversation’ (His and Hers, 1994). Here, the tensions between representations and experiences of space are sharply etched, the hypocritical nature of the city exposed.

Showing that the disjunction between male and female (and heterosexual and homosexual) is less real than imagined, Cocker thus invites the listener into a cacophony of polymorphous perversity (‘Won’t you come with me to the fairground? / Your head / Will be spinning / The louder you scream, the faster we go!’ - Fairground, 1985). In so doing, the pleasures of the city become multiple, with the focus shifting from the sexual identities found in its various neighbourhoods, clubs and bars to the sexual acts and practices that can be made and unmade in its spaces. As in the gay writing that eroticizes dirt, decay and dereliction (Bell and Binnie, 1998), Pulp’s lyrics thus suggest that specific spaces of the city and the night offer a jouissance based on forms of sexual encounter outside (and beyond) the idealised coupling of male and female. In many songs, the notion of gender and sex disappears entirely to be replaced by notions of desire creating Bodies without Organs. 

This is where desiring-production can be seen to escape from established codings and classifications of power to a new episteme where ‘separations that do not imply lack are bridged along paths that do not create unity’ (Shaviro, 1993). At the eye of the storm that is This is Hardcore (1998), for instance, a vision of ‘pure’ desire is articulated where ‘That goes in there, then that goes in there / Then that goes in there and that goes in there’. In this scenario, neither object and subject of desire are distinguishable, and while the molecular components of this machine may be ‘male’ or ‘female’, they no longer function in terms of the molar binary code of gender. Elsewhere, the sensations evoked by particular sites, objects and fabrics may themselves become erotic, not merely eliciting memories of sexual encounter, but directly raising the libido (e.g. Tunnel, 1987, Lipgloss, 1992 [below], Acrylic Afternoons, 1992). It is when these bodies, genders and spaces merge into one, and subject/objects of desire become blurred, that the contradictions of representation and experience are rendered visible.

Conclusion

We like to suppose the organisation of the external world, best symbolised by the layout of land, is natural and necessary, and that our representation of the external world merely reflects a ‘natural’ order. But what if, instead, human patterns and mediation come first? What if they are the real architectonic forces shaping the world? Then the form of reality becomes mutable and open to intervention (Kirby, 1996).

This paper has suggested that we need new ways of understanding the sexual geography of the city. This assertion is based upon the idea that it is fruitless to search for a better, more truthful representation of the city, but that we need to reflect upon the relationship between existing modes of representation and the experience of being in cities. Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s cultural materialism, it has been suggested that this does not mean we need to privilege the ‘view from below’ over the ‘view from above’ (a common psychogeographical assertion), but that we constantly need to tack between them, considering the way that sexuality is performed and understood by citizens in relation to the discourses that figure the city (not least the discourses that associate specific sites with sexual stereotypes - the prostitute, the paedophile, the pimp, the voyeur, the pornographer and so on). These different stories about the city thus become stories of the city, a city that is itself built out of multiple stories, written from both above and below.

Unlike many (academic) mappings of citysex, the music and lyrics of Pulp effectively juxtapose these discourses and experiences, populating the city’s spaces with recognizable sexual figures at the same time that these figures exceed their representational existence. Hence, this paper has highlighted two recurring sexual motifs in Pulp’s work. The first motif involves the mapping of repressive sexual identities onto the urban landscape, populating the city with paradigmatic sexual figures and stereotyped sexual practices. In many ways, this mapping reflects a dominant ‘view from above’ that refuses to engage with the complexity and messiness of human relations that are played out at street level. In contrast, the second motif disrupts dominant understandings of the connections between sexual identities and spaces by highlighting the polymorphous perversity played out in different sites - an ethnography of space that focuses upon multiple embodied experiences. Bringing these into a dialectic relation, the net result highlights the ambivalence of the sexual city, a city that at once enables and constrains. For Benjamin, the hope was that bringing the ambivalence of the modern city into sharper focus would ‘wake’ people, and allow them to live out their dreams. Pile (2000) puts this somewhat differently, suggesting that musing on the relation between images and experiences of the city may allow us to dream of new cities, new transformative possibilities. To conclude, then, while the city may not currently be a site of free erotic play, to dream it as such might just bring that imagined city into being...

...Just by the skin of our teeth / Perfection is over / The Rave is over / Sheffield is over / The Fear is over / Guilt is over / Please leave the building quietly / Bergerac is over / The hangover is over / Men are over / Women are over / Cholesterol is over / Irony is over / Bye bye bye bye 
(After the Revolution, 1998)

Works Cited

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Amin, A. and Graham, S. (1997) ‘The ordinary city’ Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 22 (4) 411-429.
Bech, H. (1998) ‘Citysex: representing lust in public’ Theory, Culture and Society 15 (3): 215-241.
Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (1998) ‘Theatres of cruelty, rivers of desire', in Fyfe, N. (ed) Images of the Street London: Routledge, 129-140. 
Benjamin, W. (1973) Charles Baudelaire: a lyrical poet in the era of high capitalism London: New Left Books.
Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project London, Belknap.
Binnie, J. and Valentine, G. (1999) ‘Geographies of sexuality - a review of progress’, Progress in Human Geography 23 (2): 175-187.
Buck-Morss, S. (1989) The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcades project London: MIT Press. 
Butler, J. (1990) ‘Gender trouble, feminist theory and psychoanalytic discourse’, in Nicholson, D. (ed) Feminism/Postmodernism London: Routledge.
Chauncey, G. (1995) Gay New York: gender, urban culture and the making of a homosexual minority in the United States 1940-1970 Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
Cream, J. (1995) ‘Re-solving riddles: the sexed body’, in Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds) Mapping desire: geographies of sexualities London: Routledge, 31-40.
de Certeau, M. (1984) The practice of everyday life Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Domosh, M. (1995) ‘Feminism and urban imagery’ Urban Geography 16 (4): 643-648.
Donald, J. (1999) Imagining the Modern City London: Athlone.
Frith, S. (1997) ‘The suburban sensibility in British rock and pop’, in Silverstone, R. (ed) Visions of suburbia London, Routledge, 120-135.
Hartley, J. (1997) ‘The sexualisation of suburbia: the diffusion of knowledge in the postmodern public sphere’ in Silverstone, R. (ed) Visions of Suburbia London: Routledge, 150-172.
Hubbard, P. (1999) Sex and the city: geographies of prostitution in the urban west Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hubbard, P.J. (2000) ‘Desire/disgust: mapping the moral contours of heterosexuality’ Progress in Human Geography 24 (2): 191-217. 
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Pulp Discography

This discography lists official UK releases only, ignoring bootlegs, live videos, enhanced CDs and appearances on soundtrack/compilation albums. NB: Most of the following album and singles were made available in multiple formats.

My Lighthouse (1983) single, Red Rhino
Everybody’s Problem (1983) single, Red Rhino
It (1983) album, Red Rhino
Little girl with blue eyes (1985) single, Red Rhino
Dogs are everywhere (1986) single, Fire
Freaks (1986) album, Fire
Masters of the Universe (1986) album, Fire
They suffocate at night (1987) single, Fire
Master of the Universe (1987) single, Fire 
My Legendary Girlfriend (1990) single, Fire
Separations (1992) album, Fire
Countdown (1992) single, Gift 
O.U. (Gone, Gone) (1992) single, Gift
Babies (1992) single, Gift 
Razzmatazz (1993) single, Gift
Lipgloss EP (1993) single, Island
Do You Remember the First Time? (1994) single, Island
The Sisters EP (1994) EP single, Island
His ‘n’ Hers (1994) album, Island
Common People (1995) single, Island
Different Class (1995) album, Island 
Intro (1995) compilation album, Island
Mis-Shapes (1995) single, Island
Disco 2000 (1995) single, Island
Something Changed (1996) single, Island
Countdown 1992-1983 (1996) compilation album, Nectar Masters
Help the Aged (1997) single, Island
This Is Hardcore (1998) album, Island
Party Hard (1998) single, Island
This Is Hardcore (1998) single, Island
A Little Soul (1998) single, Island
Pulp goes to the Disco (2000) CD compilation, Fire
Trees/Sunrise (2001) single, Island
We Love Life (2001) album, Island

:-) Copyright  2002 Phil Hubbard/The Journal of Psychogeography & Urban Research

Dr Phil Hubbard is Lecturer in Geography at Loughborough University, and has a broad interest in the geographies of urban life. His books include Sex and the City: geographies of prostitution in the urban west (1999), People and Place: the extraordinary geographies of everyday life (2001) and Thinking Geographically (2002).

Disclaimer: In no way is the media content accompanying this article used for any financial gain by The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research. It has been included only where it may serve to further the legitimate academic study of the subject in question. All media content used above MUST NOT be used for commercial purposes and is provided for scholastic research only. More on Copyright

Further Online Reading

Hardcore Pulp: http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~zarnd/
Compact portal with audio (mp3), discography, reviews, and tour dates.  

Pulp Online: http://www.pulponline.com/ 
Official Pulp Website - contains section on Sheffield including fan pictures of key urban sites frequented by Jarvis Cocker.

Bar Italia: http://www.baritalia.ukgateway.net/ 
Unofficial Pulp Website includes comprehensive discography and other data.

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